Cooking from Scratch
Okay, right off the bat, we’ll let you in on a secret. We didn’t use mascarpone cheese for the ravioli you’ll see in these photos. We really used a fresh goat cheese, which turned out really well. It’s just that we think this would be even better with mascarpone cheese, and we plan to use that next time, so we’re going to tell you how to make it using mascarpone.
Continue reading “Chocolate Ravioli with Mascarpone Filling”
Everyone likes macaroni and cheese, right? It seems to be the very definition of comfort food, always perfect for those days when you just want to relax and enjoy eating without a care in the world. To us, we just can’t imagine that macaroni and cheese could be improved. But, that lack of imagination shows why we aren’t world famous chefs like Thomas Keller. He’s taken macaroni and cheese to the next level.
Continue reading “Thomas Keller’s Mac ‘n’ Cheese”
Thirteen onions. That’s how many we had sitting on our counter, even though we’ve eaten them like crazy over the last couple of weeks. It seems as though we just get the number of onions down, and then, pow, more onions in our CSA share. We know why we get a lot of produce sometimes, but it still can be daunting when you have a small hill of onions with possibly more on the way. So, we decided to make something new with some of those onions: a Savory Onion Kugel. Now, to be honest, we’ve never made a kugel, have little idea of how to make a kugel, and we doubt that this would pass muster as a traditional kugel (they’re a generally sweet, traditionally Jewish dish), and it’s unlikely to be kosher, but we won’t let those little things stop us Scratchers.
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We mentioned on Wednesday that we had an onion tart in our near future, but, what we didn’t say was that we weren’t going to make a tart based on our Alsace Onion Tartlets recipe. Instead, we decided to make a tart with some of the goat cheese that we get from Black Mesa Ranch through the Tucson CSA. It’s not that much different in terms of effort, but, we think it is in terms of flavor. Either is a great way to use a lot of onions quickly, but surprisingly, the tarts don’t taste onion-y. Want to try it for yourself? We’ll show you what we did in the Scratchin’ It Test Kitchen.
Continue reading “Goat Cheese and Onion Tart”
This is one of those dishes we discovered while we were in San Francisco. Right around the corner from our hotel was a small French bakery, Le Marais Bakery & Bistro, where we stopped several times. One time, we picked up a couple of croissants as we headed down to the wharves, and another time we sat outside and each had a Croque Forestière. They were so good that we promised ourselves that we’d recreate them at home.
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Mornay sauce? That sounds fancy! It does sound fancy, but, really, it’s nothing other than a Bechemel sauce with cheese added; a cheese sauce, in other words. Now, we’ve done that any number of times; sometimes we mention it while we’re describing how to make a certain dish — most often macaroni and cheese of some sort — but, we’re sure that sometimes we just blast right through the recipe without pointing it out. So, why are we writing this up as a separate recipe?
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Sure, this is similar to the Baked Camembert we posted a little while ago, but it’s more upscale, using a puff pastry crust instead of bread. Since the winter here is rather short, we like to make at least one large batch of puff pastry to freeze and use in the upcoming months (during the summer, it’s just too warm to make puff pastry without the butter melting). Now, we don’t expect everyone will be up for a batch of puff pastry, so if you use a frozen, pre-made, version, we’ll understand.
Continue reading “Fromage en Croûte”